The look on the steward's face was that of someone being told that their wallet had dropped in a septic tank.
"You want us to go to Rome? Rome, New York? We can get to an airplane bound for Europe. I can promise you I have more than enough airline miles to get us there."
"But you don't?" asked Jacqueline.
"Yes, but I can still promise you that I do. I expected I could probably get you on the plane until you got tetchy about how I paid for it. Come on. We can be there before" -- she considered the lie -- "well, yes, it would be night there, but still technically today if we hurry."
Jacqueline turned to her other companion, watching the women with no particular interest in the outcome. "How far is Rome, New York?"
Wick answered, "We can be there in half an hour."
"I would like to go to that Rome, as I do not speak Italian."
Jacqueline had nothing much to say for most of the drive. The day had been long and, by its mystic nature, strange. She knew quests from myths and novels but had no baseline for how weird this day needed to be. Could they not have gone directly to Rome? The distance between Cairo and Rome would have been a touch over two hours, most of it on I-90. Wick had given her the sense that her father's death would wait for her. She didn't think another's death was the sort of thing to which one ought to be late.
What had she done or learned that was worth the hours of procrastination? She had a necklace occupied by something that wished to stop them and had ostensibly failed. She had a tagalong steward who was helpful but also might have been partly to blame for the reason they needed help. She had eaten a middling diner lunch. What did any of those mean? Should she have divined from the pattern of the ketchup on her fries a route that could have skipped the Herkimer diamond and tiny adventure park?
She realized that she would be peckish again in a few hours. It was an insubstantial human need, but it would not grow less as the day elapsed. Wakes were catered. She couldn't hope that a forecasted death would be as well. Still, Rome was a city. They would have fast food. She had associated it with death since her mother, who had demanded that her last meal on earth be a milkshake containing nothing remotely like milk.
She watched the buildings rushing past the car until, crossing the border into Rome, Wick slowed and asked where they were going.
"Rome," said Jacqueline automatically.
"More specifically," said Mica, "before I decide to make some pun about Rome and the number of days it took to--"
Jacqueline told Wick to turn, which he did without question.
Mica was not so given to implicit trust or simply too curious to know how a trick was done. "How do you know? Did your bug tell you?"
Jacqueline didn't think so, but she couldn't readily recall why she knew the destination so vividly now.
Then, in the hazy recesses, she did.
"My mom," she said, approaching the memory haltingly for fear that it would dissipate like morning fog. "We came here once. I was... God, tiny. I'm surprised any of this made an impression on me." She pointed at a tall building. "It's that one. I remembered it. I don't think she told me why we were going here, or I was too young. The drive had seemed interminable then, just endless road."
"So," said Mica, putting no mask over her suspicion, "you've been here before."
"If you asked me an hour ago, I would tell you that I'd only ever passed through."
"You've been to Anubis' home, then?" asked Wick.
Jacqueline pointed right. "We visited my father that once. It was an enormous house. Wooden clapboard siding painted this pale grass color, glassed-in porch."
"What's it like inside?" asked Mica. "I've never been in a god's house. I might not again."
Jacqueline pointed left but sat in the quiet of Mica's question. "I don't think we went inside."
"Why would you drive all that way and not go inside?"
"I was little," Jacqueline reiterated. "I don't remember. We drove here, we were outside the house, we drove home." She closed her eyes. "I didn't get out of the car, actually. I might have still been in a car seat."
"That is enough for us to get there," said Wick, sounding like an authority, as though he had been waiting all this time for her to dislodge this memory. Had she found it any sooner, would they have driven here without digression?
But she knew that they wouldn't.
"Enormous, you said?" asked the steward once they parked.
"I was maybe a toddler at the time," protested Jacqueline. "Four at the oldest. Things loom over you."
The rest was accurate to her memory. Green clapboard, glassed-in porch. The grass was tall enough to say it had not been mowed recently but had been mowed at some point. This was not a wild, abandoned place yet. Someone -- her father -- lived here, though he would not for long. What would become of the house then, Jacqueline wondered. She would see to it that this was not her problem. He fathered her, but he was not her dad, and she did not care about his affairs beyond witnessing this death.
The three exited the car, but Wick and Mica stayed on the far sidewalk. Jacqueline came a little closer, leaning against Wick's car. The hood beneath her was hot, bordering on uncomfortable, but the burning on her hands grounded her in the moment.
A god should not live here. Her father should not die here. Neither mattered now or were things that she could overturn, nor did she think she would if she had the power.
Why would her mother have bothered coming here? Had it been to demand that he act like a father? It didn't gel with anything she knew about her mom.
"I know you are giving me time."
"Yeah, that's obvious," said Mica, then softened. "We're not rushing you. You made it this far. When you are ready to cross the street, we're behind you. Unless you don't want us to be."
"You just want to see a god's living room."
"I don't deny that, but it's not my main concern now."
"I have seen the home of a god," said Wick. "You may not be impressed."
Mica tapped him on the shoulder as though to scold him.
"We are here for you," said Wick, meaning it more literally. They were, indeed, here because Jacqueline was the abandoned daughter of a dying god. Otherwise, she would never know either of them or doubted she would, on balance, have minded this.
Jacqueline drummed her fingers. "I need you to turn your backs so I can get changed in the car. I am not facing my father looking like this."
Jacqueline opened the porch door. To her right was a table and benches that fit so snugly that it seemed that the porch had been built around them. On the table was a bowl of strange-looking fruit. Mica crossed to it, dragging her short thumbnail down, a ribbon of wax scratched free.
To their left, a folding lawn chair and a stack of newspapers bound with twine.
"I don't want to be that guy," said Mica, "but we are sure that Anubis still resides here, right?" Resides sounded forced, as though she were not so tactless as to say lived.
Intellectually, Jacqueline wasn't sure. Some hobbled dowager, maybe, but not her father. Her heart did not agree. "I'm sure."
She knocked on the door, nine raps in three sets, each coming with longer pauses between. She gently rattled the knob in her hand, feeling for the rigidity of a lock. But, no, it was unlocked. She did not have to assert that she had a right to enter. Who had a better claim for trespassing?
Frankincense or sandalwood did not greet them as they stepped through the threshold, odors that would befit the mystical. Instead, it smelled of diapers and age. To their left was an antique rolltop desk, closed and dusty, and a black rotary phone beside, the walls covered in a thousand sleeves of vinyl records. Across from it was a daybed in floral print, a glass case with knickknacks at its foot and a bureau at its head.
"Hello?" Jacqueline called, hoping for a hearty, masculine voice to return her unsteady greeting. Maybe this was an ambush, some godly trick, and Mica would whip up magic to counter an assault. It would be high excitement for Mica, terror for Jacqueline, and Wick would look over it all as though he didn't have a care in the world. Houdini would do something brave -- but not too brave -- and they would be saved at the last minute. It would be a story Jacqueline would want to tell for the rest of her life, how she walked into a supernatural trap and, through gumption and luck, walked out the victor.
She almost convinced herself that she could hear the reply, but none came. She heard labored breathing a room further, past a staircase carpeted in a dingy brown pattern.
Jacqueline approached, nearly on tiptoes, so much did she not want to make a sound. The breathing grew closer, as though she were standing in place, as though the breather was the one who sought to sneak up on her. It reminded her of a monster from a cheesy horror movie, the sound of the breathing, but that was not why it frightened her. She hated it because she had heard that sound before, for days, growing wetter and more strained before fading away in a sleep from which her mother did not wake.
A round woman with a haggard and kind face, her lipstick smudged on the corner of her lip, stuck her head around the corner, holding a finger to her lips, but she gestured for Jacqueline and her companions to approach.
"He's resting," whispered the hospice nurse, as she must have been. Jacqueline knew well their demeanor and what resting meant to them. Shouldn't a god have handmaidens, emissaries, or something less mundane than a woman whose name was likely Shirley or Crystal?
The woman gave a nod but did not extend her hand. None of the three took offense at this, though Jacqueline understood that this was because that hand may have been doing unenviable things before they had entered. "I'm Stacy, his nurse."
Close enough.
Not touching Stacy seemed like keeping herself once removed from death. She looked around Jacqueline's shoulder to Mica, standing on her back leg and looking around as though to intentionally avoid looking directly into the living room that she had so bravely wanted to examine when they were still on the street. "You must be the daughter. He talks about you all the time, said he was just waiting 'til you got here."
That waiting seemed pregnant.
"I'm the daughter," Jacqueline said.
Stacy's recovery from this faux pas was all but instant. "Of course you are. You look just like him."
This was a lie, or she would not have mistaken the steward for his blood relation entirely because, of the three of them, she looked least as though she wanted to be there.
"He's never mentioned me before," said Jacqueline mildly.
"A few times this weekend," agreed Stacy. "Didn't have any contact info for you. Wasn't even sure your last name, only that it wasn't his." The nurse paused to measure what would be proper to say but continued no matter, "I halfway didn't think he had a daughter. No pictures of you on the walls, leastways. When people are at this stage, they can see and say things that... well, it's true to them."
To the moment of her death, Jacqueline's mother had confessed to nothing that she couldn't verify. Yet Jacqueline could not be assured that she wouldn't reach for a hand that had never existed at the hour of her own death. What better time to forgive someone all their weaknesses?
"Can I see him?" asked Jacqueline, but this was too passive, as though she would let this stranger deny her this, even though Jacqueline was only fractionally less a stranger to her father. "I want to see him."
Stacy gave a slow nod. "Of course. He said you would be coming today. Didn't know when."
Despite the animosity that simmers from a lifetime of absence and neglect, pity washed over Jacqueline at first sight of the person in the bed. To the same magnitude of childhood exaggeration to which the house had been subjected, the man under these sheets was far more shrunken than how she remembered her father. He had dwindled to nearly a child himself, albeit one bearing a few days growth of beard, a cannula in his nose. Only here did Jacqueline register the almost rodent hums and chirps of the machines beside him, performing those functions that his body no longer could, monitoring for vitals that would slip more and more.
He would die today. Soon, Jacqueline knew. Now that she was here, her father would take the permission she could not give. Why had he waited? What's her Anubis to her, or Jacqueline to her father?
Across from his bed, a television showed the Home Shopping Network on mute. She could not imagine to whose benefit this was.
She pulled an antique, threadbare chair from a table and placed it beside his bed. The perfume of a failing body, turnippy sharp and the sting of urine, wafted over her. She had worn it before, had been accustomed enough to it for someone she loved, and it bothered her less now than it might have.
Her father stirred, his fingers tapping at the off-white sheets on the bed, his thin arms pressing the metal of the bed's railing.
His breathing grew quicker, the machines adjusting their sounds accordingly.
Her father rasped for minutes, waking painful to him, before turning his sunken eyes to her.
The wet rattle of his lungs became all that Jacqueline knew. Then he said, "You've brought my death."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
